


Everything Else

by RitaM



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 05:14:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7346542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RitaM/pseuds/RitaM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack Robinson knows that Phryne Fisher won't be shackled down.</p><p>He'd rather have everything else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything Else

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lexigent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexigent/gifts).



> (Second fandom work ever, first in, oh, ten years. Be gentle?
> 
> Also, I so totally blame Lexigent for this.)

There was a case. Wasn't there always? He rubbed his eyes. The documents he'd been reading stopped making sense long time ago. A break was in order. As his thoughts drifted, he ended up where he frequently did: with one Honorable Phryne Fisher.

It seemed like wherever Phryne Fisher went, murder followed. To be fair, she had a large network of contacts who then advised their friends to engage the Lady Detective: a rich lady who so often was willing to forgo payment. She was memorably charming and beautiful, no wonder that her reputation preceded her; every case that wasn't her business, sooner or later became it.

He's done his part of blocking her participation. First of all, it wouldn't do to give in too easily; his men needed to know that just because Miss Fisher wanted something, it didn't mean she should get it. Hugh Collins could learn that lesson most of all, Jack thought, scowling. Hugh's inexperience with women meant that whenever Dot or Phryne herself showed up, they played him like a bloody harp. 

The other part he was less proud of, but... some days, he lived for the banter that she provided. If he backed off every time she came waltzing in, chances were she'd stop looking at him in that measuring way, stop cajoling and charming and batting her eyelashes. He had a feeling that once Phryne Fisher conquered something, she lost interest in it. And he had no intention of being conquered.

He could see her in his mind's eye: sparkling in another outrageous gown, knife strapped to her thigh, evidence likely hidden in her cleavage... Jack felt himself smile slightly. She would be pacing, thinking out loud; defending yet another mistreated child, hackles raised at another disrespectful man in authority. Not Jack, though: Jack respected her wits and her will. It was that respect that made him throw down the gauntlet every time she came by.

Or perhaps it was her, always challenging. A living, breathing challenge, that was Phryne Fisher. He rather enjoyed it, as he made her work for every clue, every conclusion. She would, eventually, breeze past him with some pilfered evidence, some joyous put-down, but he did not make it easy.

And after: the whisky, the flirtation, perhaps a solitary candle. All those ridiculous rich people parties, where he escorted her in the face of her scowling Aunt Prudence. All the costumes she tried to get him to wear, all the picnics. And inevitably: all the men she flirted with, extracted information from, leading them by the tie to eventually, come back and report.

He wasn't one of her men. He wouldn't visit her boudoir, wouldn't take what she offered so freely. Instead, he waited, refusing to let her drag him off, refusing to cave. Instead, he was the one who saw her through Rene Dubois affair - with a well-placed kiss of all things; he was the one carrying her out from Murdoch Foyle's basement.

She was the one who looked him in the eye on the day of his divorce, and saw him a little bit naked, a little bit raw.

Sex was not his province. For a long time now, his capacity for intimacy... seemed to have died in the war. That perhaps wasn't the cause of his divorce, but most definitely a factor. Rosie would accept a man who wouldn't bed her, or even a man who wouldn't speak to her: both, it seemed, were the death knell of his marriage. The guilt ate at him, even as he knew that it was better this way. Damaged as he was, he couldn't be with someone this normal, focused on career and advancing in society. He had dark wartime nightmares and lived other people's nightmares daily; he alleviated one by the other. Solving cases held demons at bay - no desk job could give him that. He couldn't have given Rosie what she'd wanted.

Now he refused to give Phryne what she wanted, but somehow it felt very different. If he'd offered sex, she wouldn't turn him down, he knew; but they knew each other too deeply for a mere dalliance. She would never not matter. And she knew that, too; for all her flirtation, she was being gentle - for all her pushing, she respected the distance. It was a push-pull dance, playful and unsteady and he cherished it - with every tug at his hat or collar that changed into caress mid-air, every tumbler of whisky, she led him on a merry chase, waiting for him to catch up. He called her Miss Fisher as a demonstration of curmudgeonly resistance, even as she made him smile despite himself.

Truth was, before he knew it, he was intimate with her, as much as he knew how. Oh, she took his breath away with her beauty, but he continued treading carefully. Before he knew it, she's got under his skin.

They were so different. War polished her to a bright shine; she was blinding like a new knife. He was the definition of rusty, heavy with old blood. Her strategy was an epicurean feast, he closed himself off against the hurt. But perhaps, he mused, Phryne had a different way of closing off. All those men, allowed this far and not further, allowed to take her to dinner and to bed, but not to accompany her on cases or to events. Rumour mill notwithstanding, nobody ever got to boast being Phryne Fisher's lover. Nobody ever got that far.

Yes, he decided. Let those men have the boudoir, the unspoken, the fleeting pleasures. He would not begrudge them, or her, those moments. He'd rather have evenings in her parlour and amused glances in interrogation; he'd rather have long, silent goodbyes and irritated greetings as she insinuated herself into yet another crime scene. He was not to be her dalliance, her secret or not-so-secret beau - he'd rather thank Mr Butler for another perfect picnic basket or join one of her family-only parties. Let those other men have what he wouldn't come forward to take, then fade from her life and be forgotten.

He'd rather have everything else.


End file.
